Grow your business faster with machine learning: Part I

Marketers are increasingly turning to Google’s machine learning to meet consumer expectations and grow their business, faster. To learn more, read the first post in our three-part blog series on machine learning.Read the post.

Brand marketers since the “Mad Men” era have often sought insight to a simple question: ‘Was my ad seen?’ The answer was that your ad was published, your commercial ran, your online impression served on a web page, but it was impossible to say with certainty whether an ad was viewed or not. Thanks to leaps forward in digital technology and the hard work of many in the industry, it's now possible to measure whether an ad is viewable onscreen. Given this progress, it's not a matter of if this becomes the standard, but when.

We support a viewable impressions standard and have been partnering with the industry to push this forward. Today we've reached an important milestone on this journey - Media Rating Council (MRC) accreditation for our viewability measurement solution, Active View, which we introduced last year.

"We are very pleased that Google has achieved accreditation for its Active View product" said George Ivie, CEO and Executive Director of the Media Rating Council. "Viewable impressions are an important foundational improvement in digital measurement and an important step toward comparability with other electronic media."

Active View complements our other investments in making digital an effective medium for brand marketers and their awareness-building campaigns, like Lightbox ads and TrueView in AdMob and games. These efforts appear to be paying off for brand advertisers: we saw a 65 percent increase last quarter alone in the number of brand advertisers using our brand formats and buying tools.

The Active View Roadmap
Viewability has the power to transform the industry: improving the value of marketers’ spend, and of publishers’ sites. We’ve also designed this metric to be actionable, not just for after-the-fact reporting. Based on Active View, advertisers can buy reservable inventory on the Google Display Network (GDN), paying only for impressions that meet the Interactive Advertising Bureau’s proposed viewability standard - at least 50% on screen for one second or longer.

Effective metrics also serve as a universal currency, building an understanding between marketers and content creators about the best way to reach an audience, and the value of an ad on a page. This is why we’ll be building Active View into our products both for advertisers and publishers. In addition to its use on the GDN, Active View reporting will be available in DoubleClick for Advertisers and DoubleClick for Publishers in 2013. Long term, we see this becoming the new standard for how impressions are bought, sold and measured, replacing the “served impressions” metric we have today.

While many intuitively suspected that increased viewability would directly translate into better campaign performance, we now have data to back that up. On our network, we compared ads by the number of seconds they appeared on screen and found:

Users are more likely to click on viewable ads -- up to 21 times more.

Viewability can help publishers discover “gold below the fold,” with CTR doubling, on average, for below-the-fold inventory. On average, we’ve found that CTR is comparable for viewable above-the-fold and viewable below-the-fold inventory.

The longer users view an ad, the bigger the boost for click-through rates (we saw up to a 125% increase when an ad was viewed for more than 20 seconds).

Figure 1. Comparison of CTR for viewable v. non-viewable ads, shown for all ads (left panel) and BTF inventory only (right panel) (100% = the average CTR of the specified dataset).

Figure 2. CTR by viewable time, detail.*Data source for all figures: Google Display Network 2% sample from February 2013; display ads only; viewable = 50% onscreen. In all figures, 100% on the y-axis denotes the average CTR across all ad queries in the specified dataset.

Google’s MRC accreditation, which currently applies to the Google Display Network and DoubleClick for Advertisers, was based on a thorough assessment of a number of factors, including the detection process, quality control and delivery standards.

With this accreditation, we are one step closer to making a viewable standard a reality for our partners. With better measurement, we think it's possible to unlock a new golden age of creation across the web, where users can enjoy great content, brands can connect with their customers and content creators can accelerate their growth.

Savvy marketers understand that you don’t always seal the deal with a single message, image, or advertisement. A user may see a display ad, click on a link from a friend, or do a search before buying something from your website — and all of these interactions can play a role in the final sale. It’s important to understand the entire customer journey so you can measure all of the elements that contribute to your campaigns, attribute the right value to them, and adjust your marketing budgets where appropriate.

That’s the philosophy behind Google Analytics tools like Multi-Channel Funnels and Attribution Modeling. Tens of thousands of our largest advertisers are gaining valuable insights from Multi-Channel Funnels every month, and we’ve collected these insights using aggregate statistics to develop a benchmarking tool — The Customer Journey to Online Purchase. This interactive tool lets you explore typical online buying behavior and see how different marketing interactions affect business success.

how different marketing channels (such as display, search, email, and your own website) help move users towards purchases. For example, some marketing channels play an “assist” role during the earlier stages of the marketing funnel, whereas some play a “last interaction” role just before a sale.

how long it takes for customers to make a purchase online (from the first time they interact with your marketing to the moment they actually buy something), and how the length of this journey affects average order values.

Channel Roles in the Customer Journey
The data shows that every industry is different — the path to purchase for hotel rooms in Japan is not necessarily the same as the path as for an online supermarket in Canada.

A few findings stand out, in particular:

As you might expect, customers typically click on display ads early in their purchase journeys, but in some industries, such as US travel and auto, display clicks tend to occur closer to the purchase decision.

Across industries and countries, paid search has a fairly even assist-to-last interaction ratio, implying that this channel can act both in the earlier and later stages of the customer journey.

Advanced tip:

Once you’ve explored the benchmarks, look deeper into your own marketing data with the Multi-Channel Funnel reports, and consider defining your channels and campaigns to separate out categories that are specific to your business needs.

Purchase values and the length of the journey
We also see interesting patterns emerge when examining the length of the customer journey. While the majority of purchases take place within a single day or a single step (i.e., a single interaction with one marketing channel), longer paths tend to correlate with higher average order values.

For example,

in US Tech, online purchases that take more than 28 days are worth about 3.5 times more than purchases that occur immediately. And while 61% of tech purchases take place on that first day, only 53% of revenue comes from single-day purchases.

in Consumer Packaged Goods (CPG), on the other hand, most purchases (82%) are quick, likely because these are smaller and simpler purchases that don’t require much research.

in Edu / Gov, 41% of revenue comes from multi-day purchases, but 60% of revenue comes from multi-step purchases — suggesting that even when customers make decisions in a relatively short time period, they often have multiple marketing interactions before purchasing.

Advanced tip:

In Multi-Channel Funnels or the Attribution Modeling Tool, you can adjust the lookback window to reflect the typical length of the purchase path in your industry. For example, if your business tends to have shorter paths, you can zoom in on paths that take 5 days or less:

Putting the benchmarks to work
For marketers, it’s always a crucial challenge to design campaigns that deliver the right message at the right moment in a customer’s journey to purchase. We hope these benchmarks will provide useful insights about the journey and help you put your business into context. In particular, take a look at the final infographic, the “Benchmarks Dashboard,” to get a quick overview of your industry. Then, when you view your own data in the Multi-Channel Funnels reports in Google Analytics, you’ll gain a better understanding of where different channels impact your conversions and what your typical path looks like, so you can adjust your budgeting and marketing programs accordingly.

Great ad campaigns have always required two things: knowing your audience, and using that knowledge to reach them in smart ways.

Today we're thrilled to announce new innovations that will help display advertisers with both parts of that equation. They are the Google Display Planner and two new reports: Demographic Performance and Placement Performance.

First, meet the Google Display Planner, a free research and planning tool that delivers targeting ideas and estimates to help you build better display campaigns. Based on data you enter, the tool suggests places to run your ads on the Google Display Network along with key related details: impression and cookie ranges for our inventory, age and gender breakdowns, and historical cost-per-click (CPC) information. These features can help you:

Find new inventory. Display Planner finds and suggests thousands of websites, mobile applications and video channels for your ads across the online world.

Generate targeting ideas. Are you trying to reach golfers, or new parents? Just describe their interests, websites you know they visit and products they buy. Display Planner will use that data to suggest good keywords and other targeting ideas.

Turn data into insights. What is the total opportunity for your Google Display Network campaign and what can you expect in return? Display Planner tells you, with estimates and historical data to back it up.

Display Planner

Display Planner is part of AdWords, so with one click you can add your plan directly to your account, or download to share it. Display Planner will be available in the Tools & Analysis menu, and will be rolling out to the US over the course of this week, and globally in the next few weeks. You can learn more in our Help Center.

Now for the other half of the equation: knowing your audience. Our two new reports will help you understand how your ads perform across different customer segments and websites.

Demographic Performance Reports show how different demographic segments, gender and age buckets, respond to your messages by showing the impression, click and conversion rates for each group - a marketer's dream! Armed with these new insights you can quickly tailor your ads to be more relevant for your audience, and modify your targeting and bidding settings for better performing campaigns.

New Age Reports in Display Network Tab

New Placement Performance Reports combine automatic and managed placements in one report, so you can see quickly how your ads perform on different websites and adjust your targeting and bidding accordingly and with ease. These new reports will be available globally in the next few weeks in the Display Network Tab.

The beauty of digital is real-time information and real-time action. We hope these new features will give you more insights, better ways to act on them, and an easier and more efficient way for you to buy display ads.

Enhanced campaigns help you reach people with the right ads based on their context - including location, time of day and device - without having to set up and manage several separate campaigns. For most advertisers, upgrading is a simple 3-step process. Already, advertisers have upgraded more than 1.5 million campaigns and seen strong results.

New upgrade center

Today we're introducing the upgrade center to make upgrading easier for advertisers with lots of campaigns. With the upgrade center, you can upgrade several campaigns at a time and merge campaigns together with just a few clicks. As the upgrade center rolls out to all accounts over the next few weeks, you can access it from the left-hand nav bar on the Campaigns tab. Learn more.

Upgrade center entry point

There are two basic ways to use the upgrade center.

1. Bulk upgrade

This option provides a fast way to upgrade multiple campaigns that don’t need to be merged. Rather than upgrade campaigns one at a time, you can select several campaigns, choose a mobile bid adjustment, view traffic estimates, and upgrade with fewer clicks.

2. Merge and upgrade

If you have search-only or search+display campaigns that have similar keywords and location targets, the upgrade center automatically identifies them as candidates to merge. You’ll then be able to preview and adjust the proposed campaign settings, ad groups, and extensions for the merged campaign. By default, ad groups and budgets will be combined. Other campaign level settings and extensions in the Primary campaign will override those in the Secondary campaign.

Table view of merged campaign settings

After creating new enhanced campaigns, we recommend upgrading your extensions for more control, flexibility and relevance. You may also want to add back any important keywords, negatives, extensions, or location targets from your Secondary campaign which were left behind in the merge.

We recommend upgrading display-only campaigns rather than merging them together. The upgrade tool doesn't support the ability to merge image ads, audience targeting criteria, and other display-specific campaign elements.

There’s also an advanced mode in the upgrade center, which provides a view of all of the campaigns in your account, providing more flexibility and less guidance if you’ve already developed a strategy for how to merge and upgrade.

Reminders
Starting on July 22, 2013, we will begin upgrading all campaigns to enhanced campaigns. As you’re upgrading to enhanced campaigns, please continue to share your feedback using our feedback form.

To learn more about strategies for upgrading to enhanced campaigns and the upgrade center, please join us today at 10:00 a.m. PDT at our Learn with Google webinar.

People are constantly connected and are moving between devices throughout the day to shop, connect and stay entertained. This creates great opportunities for advertisers to use context – like location, time of day, and device – to show the right ad and bid more efficiently. In February, we launched enhanced campaigns to help you reach people with ads based on their context as well as their intent. Since then, advertisers have already upgraded over 1.5 million campaigns and have shared many success stories.

We’ve also continued to build new features on the enhanced campaigns foundation. Today, we are introducing two additions.

Enhanced campaigns and social annotations

People are looking for relevant information, and sometimes the most helpful signals are recommendations from people who know a brand or business well. Social annotations in AdWords show endorsements from people following your Google+ page on your search ads. Many businesses such as Red Bull, National Geographic and H&M are using social annotations as part of their broader Google+ strategy. On average, search ads with social annotations have a 5-10% higher click-through rate.

Starting today, enhanced campaigns will include social annotations when they can improve ad performance, without additional edits to campaign settings. All you need is a Google+ page with a significant number of followers and a linked website that matches the URL in your search ads. Learn more about how this works.

Social annotations on AdWords work hand-in-hand with your Google+ page to build community, conversation and engagement with your business on Google. Learn more about getting your business started on Google+.

Enhanced campaigns for mobile app advertisers

Apps have become a significant part of people’s everyday mobile experiences. In fact, US consumers spend an average of 127 minutes per day using mobile apps1. Advertisers can now reach app users, with ads in apps, based on people’s context like location, time of day and device, with enhanced campaigns. For example, if a certain mobile app has the most usage on Saturday evenings, you can increase your bid adjustments for mobile and this time of day to reach these users. You can also adjust bids across the key display signals like demographics, interests, topics and remarketing at the ad group level. All of these powerful bidding tools will enable you to reach the right people with the right ads.

Upgrading strategies webinar tomorrow

After upgrading, you’ll be able to start using all of the new features in enhanced campaigns. Join us tomorrow, Tuesday, April 23, 2013 at 10am PDT, for a Learn with Google webinar about upgrade strategies (sign up here).

Feedback

We really value your feedback to help us make AdWords even better. Please continue to share your thoughts using this form so we can continue to improve the product.Posted by Christian Oestlien, Director of Product Management, Google Display Network1"Time Spent with Mobile Apps Rivals TV emarketer. December 11, 2012."

Online advertising helps to support the services we all enjoy and enables businesses to grow. The vast majority of our online publishers are terrific partners we love working with. But, as always in life, there are a few bad apples.

So, we invest a lot of time and effort in keeping them off our systems.

Our main line of defense against these bad apples is technology — which enables us to monitor the clicks and impressions we receive, and also to scan both our partners’ sites and downloadable software. These tools operate at the click- and page-levels, so we can pick up bad content and bad practices (like artificial traffic) at a very granular level.

3. Human Review

We have hundreds of employees around the world who review web pages, test our partners’ downloadable software, and prevent ads from showing on sites that violate our policies. Depending on the severity and persistence of the offense, they may stop ad serving on that page or site, or across the publisher’s entire account.

The numbers show we continue to make good headway. We have doubled the rate at which we review publisher inventory — enabling us to deal with bad sites and practices more quickly. In 2012, we found 17% fewer bad actors than in the previous year — even though we increased enforcement and tightened our policies.

Make it very difficult to remove downloaded software from your device or to restore your defaults;

Load additional unwanted software applications to your device; and

Access personal information or infect your machine with malware.

For example, in the last 90 days, we have seen over 100,000 complaints about software that changed users’ browser settings or about toolbars that they couldn’t uninstall. We want to avoid these kinds of bad user experiences. So we recently updated our policies and enforcement to ensure that software accessing our services complies with the following rules. It must:

Be pre-approved by Google;

Offer one-click, complete uninstall;

Provide clear, full disclosure and transparency to people about what is being installed and what changes are being made to their devices;

Install itself on only one browser per download;

Be bundled with and distributed by only reputable parties who comply with our policies.

It’s simple — we don’t want our programs or services abused in ways that can harm users. We believe that our ongoing efforts to fight abuse will ensure our advertising ecosystem continues to work in the best interests of users, publishers and advertisers.

People are constantly connected and moving between devices to communicate, shop and stay entertained. Their context – like location, time of day, and device – is an increasingly important signal for advertisers. In February, we launched enhanced campaigns to help you reach people with ads based on their context as well as their intent, all from a single campaign. In just a few short months since launch, we are already hearing enhanced campaigns success stories from businesses of all sizes.

Ad group mobile bid adjustments
To provide more control and precision over bids in an enhanced campaign, advertisers will soon be able to set a mobile bid adjustment at the ad group level. This functionality will be available to all advertisers in mid-May. We think this may be useful if you’ve been operating large scale campaigns and found that your optimal bids for some keywords would require significantly different mobile bid adjustments within an enhanced campaign.

Example: A nationwide retail chain currently uses mobile-only campaigns to optimize bids for several hundred thousand keywords. They’ve found that 95% of their keywords in mobile-only campaigns have bids that are 10% lower than in the equivalent desktop campaigns. The remaining 5% of their keywords have very different bid ratios (ranging from 40% lower to 100% higher) based on differences in performance and competition on mobile and desktop. By using the new ad group bid adjustments for mobile, this retailer can better maintain their desired bids and ROI on different devices as they upgrade to enhanced campaigns.

The majority of advertisers will still see the most value in using the existing campaign level bid adjustments in enhanced campaigns, so we recommend that you upgrade now to access all the new features. Upgrading takes an easy 3 steps for most advertisers [video]:

Upcoming dates
We’ll share more details and tips here on the AdWords blog when ad group level mobile bid adjustments are generally available in mid-May. API access for this feature will be available in early May and announced on the developer blog.

We will begin automatically upgrading all AdWords campaigns to enhanced campaigns starting on July 22, 2013.

Feedback
Thank you for your feedback on enhanced campaigns. Please continue to share your thoughts with us using this form so we can continue to improve the product.

In December, we announced a promotional credit for all eligible merchants in Australia, Japan, Brazil, Czech Republic, Spain, Italy, France, Netherlands, U.K., Germany and Switzerland who create a Product Listing Ad campaign promoting all the products in their Merchant Center account before April 12, 2013. This credit is designed to help international merchants transition to Google Shopping's new commercial model, built on Product Listing Ads. This transition will be complete in June 2013.

With only 4 days left until the April 12th deadline, we encourage merchants in the countries below to learn more about the promotional credit and apply before it’s too late!

In addition to the promotional credit above, eligible merchants with a Product Listing Ad campaign promoting all products will receive a monthly credit for 10% of their total Product Listing Ad spend up to to June 30, 2013.

To get help setting up your Product Listing Ads, please visit this quick guide, email us through this form or call one of our specialists at your country’s number below.

You can also join Google Engage for Agencies on April 10, 9:00AM PST/12:00PM EST to learn how you can help your clients use this beautifully simple experience to better promote their products and attract more customers.

We'll share an overview of Google Shopping, insights into new features, and optimization tips and best practices.

About two months ago, we launched enhanced campaigns to help you more simply and smartly manage your campaigns in today’s multi-device world. Recently we’ve been hearing some great stories about ways that advertisers have improved their performance and saved time with enhanced campaigns. While every advertiser’s business and potential gains may be unique, here are a few examples that highlight actual strategies and results achieved so far with enhanced campaigns.

e-Travel is one of the leading online travel agents in Greece, Cyprus and Russia, and has presence in other markets in Europe, the Middle East and North Africa. After upgrading to enhanced campaigns, Managing Director Nikos Goulis reported, “We can now show our ads according to people's context like location or time of day [... and] count app downloads as conversions in AdWords reports, which is very important for us because so many of our new customer leads come from our mobile app. These features along with the upgraded sitelinks helped us boost clickthrough rate by 43% and conversion rate by 32%."

American Apparel has doubled its volume of phone leads with enhanced campaigns, improving return on ad spend.

American Apparel, a multi-channel fashion retailer, upgraded all its campaigns to take advantage of new features like upgraded call extensions and sitelinks. By extending call extensions across all device types, and counting calls over 10 seconds in duration as a conversion, American Apparel has seen their conversion volume from phone calls double. Return on spend has improved significantly.

A luxury online shopping destination had been focusing its search engine marketing efforts on optimizing bids in location-specific campaigns aimed at primary markets like New York City and Los Angeles. Since upgrading to enhanced campaigns, the company started using location bid adjustments to test and expand its AdWords presence in new geographies, including affluent areas of Delaware, South Carolina, and New Mexico. Already, the company has grown total conversion volume by 20% while achieving target return on ad spend.

Hotwire.com, a leading discount travel website upgraded all of their paid search accounts to Enhanced Campaigns, both domestic and international, within the first month. Clay Schulenburg, Director of Search Engine Marketing at Hotwire shared that upgrading to Enhanced Campaigns really helped his team manage AdWords more efficiently because all the key adjustments for location, time of day and device are now managed in a single campaign: “Time saved per SEM analyst is somewhere in the range of 5 – 10 hours per work week that can now be reallocated to either new strategic SEM initiatives or more granular account/campaign optimizations.”

Get started in 3 steps
If you’re among the 95% of advertisers whose legacy campaigns currently run across all device types, you can upgrade in just three steps to take advantage of enhanced campaigns:

Recently, based largely on your feedback, we announced the launch of new ValueTrack features to help advertisers using keyword level URLs achieve specific conversion and ROI goals. These features are now live and ready for you to apply to your campaigns. To recap:

We’re changing the existing parameter {ifmobile:[value]}. Previously, the ifmobile parameter would insert [value] when a user clicked your ad on either a tablet or a mobile device. Now, it will only trigger from an ad click on a mobile device.

We’ve added a new parameter, {ifnotmobile:[value]}, where you can replace [value] with text that will then show up in your URL when the user clicks on your ad from a computer or tablet.

With our launch of bulk editing back in November, large-scale changes across your entire AdWords account became much easier. Today, we are launching keyword bulk uploads to help you add, edit and remove keywords at scale.

Have you ever downloaded a keyword report and wished you could make changes to your account directly, without having to upload the report into another tool or go back into the AdWords UI and search for the same keywords you already have in front of you? Now you can. Right in your downloaded keyword reports, you can add, delete, edit, pause, and unpause keywords, and then upload these changes directly into your AdWords account.

This feature not only saves you time, but it also provides a new level of flexibility and automation by allowing you to use standard spreadsheet functions and logic to manage your keywords. Here’s an example. Imagine you want to create exact match versions of all your broad match keywords, and you want to set their MaxCPC bids to be 20% higher than their broad match counterparts. You can quickly do this by copying the broad match rows, changing the match type column value, and creating a basic formula to multiply the existing bids by 1.20. Then, you simply upload the entire sheet and AdWords will apply your changes.

Here’s a quick look at how it works:

On the same page where you’ve always been able to download keyword reports, click the box that says “Editable.” This will download a special, editable version of the keyword performance report that you can modify and then upload. In order to get the hang of this feature, check out the keyword bulk uploads article in the AdWords Help Center for some basic instructions.

Once you’ve finished making your edits, you are ready to save your changes and upload your report. You can save your changes in CSV, TSV and Excel formats. To upload this file, click “Reports and uploads” on the left navigation window, and then click the “Uploads” tab.

It’s important to know that once a bulk upload is submitted, there is no way to cancel or automatically reverse your changes. Therefore, we recommend that you always save a copy of your original downloaded report in case you ever need to see what your settings were before you made changes and submitted a bulk upload. You can also view your change history and reverse any unintended changes manually.